Morning Edition; Mindy Lee and Dacia Clark

It's morning edition on 89K RPS, I'm Fred Fletcher-Fierro. Taking place next Wednesday, August 7th, the Kansas Small Business Development Center at Pittsburgh State is hosting three seminars at Block 22 in downtown Pittsburgh. The first seminar gets underway at 8.30 a.m. on Wednesday. It's called Social Media for Your Business. This hour I'm joined by a State Marketing Manager, Mindy Leap, and the SBDC's Assistant Director, Dacia Clark, to speak both about the social media for your business discussion, but also about the two other seminars that will take place on Wednesday, August 7th. Welcome to you both. Thank you. We'll start the discussion at Bounce Social Media. I'm sure all of our listeners know what social media is, but it's a little different when you're running an account or a presence, online presence, as a business owner. So what will this class cover? This class is going to cover some basic principles of social media, kind of teaching people how to interact with it from a business perspective. And it'll teach people how to take advantage of sort of the insights and the analytics

of social media, because social media now has so many opportunities for people to kind of learn about their customer base and their audience, and then tailor their message through their Facebook page or their Instagram or Twitter page based on those analytics. So it's pretty comprehensive what you can do with social media for your business. And so the workshop kind of goes over that. To start a business page on Facebook, there's no cost to do that, and there's no cost to get access to the analytics and the insights. It is something that if you have a personal Facebook page, you cannot see those things. But once you open that business page, you get access to all this just as wealth of data about your customers and your audience. And a lot of people, maybe they don't know about that, or they're not really familiar with how the insights work. But it's a lot of really great information that you can use to sort of tailor your message online. I do want to mention that registration is not required, but it is preferred. It is preferred, definitely. We don't turn anyone away if they want to walk in to the workshop. But with the registration, we kind of have a good idea of how many people to expect, so

we can make sure that we have everything set up to tailor a presentation towards how many people are in the room. But if someone wants to walk in that morning, they kind of wake up and decide, hey, I kind of think I want to go to these workshops now, you know, we won't turn you away if you want to walk in. I just want to say also that the session on social media is scheduled for Wednesday, August 7th. So it's at 8.30 in the morning. And moving on to the online marketing session, that starts at 10.30. When I look at the lineup of these three seminars taking place next week, I think that you've lined them up for one to feed into the other. Business owners know that marketing their business is important. That's the session that starts at 10.30. It's marketing your business. And what is this class going to cover? So this class kind of covers things that are outside social media, not to say that social media doesn't play a huge role in online marketing because it does. But these are topics that I don't cover in social media seminars. So things like, you know, search engine optimization, Google for your business, the importance of a website. These are things I don't address in the morning seminar with social media, but are very important to cover.

So that's why we have this separate online marketing workshop. So in one way, Facebook and the online pro online presence is one thing, but there's a whole, the Google optimization search to try to get your business to the top of these search results locally. You a business owner can control that? Yeah, it can be, it does take time to sort of build up your presence online and to end up. I do want to throw this out there because I get this question a lot. When it comes to Google, Google will never call you. And if anyone calls you and tells you they can get you on the front page of Google, it is a scam. They cannot guarantee that. If you want to end up on the front page of Google, it takes a lot of time. It takes a lot of work, marketing is a process. So no one can make those guarantees. They just want your money. So don't buy into those. Do not take any calls from people who claim to be from Google or Facebook who can make you on the front page of anything. I mean, it just, it doesn't happen, not instantly, not overnight. It is a process. But social media does play into search engine optimization, which is basically, it's an

organic, non-paid way for your business to show up online. So social media plays into that. Your website plays into it. It's all interconnected. People starting with a social media workshop can flow straight into online marketing and see how social media plays a role in that as well as, you know, Google analytics, Google business and your website. And the session focused on online marketing is Wednesday morning starts at 10.30. The social media session starts at 8.30, so if you're going to go to one, probably if you want to stay for the other, finally, it's probably fair to say that everything a business owner does is focused on one thing. Making money. That's right. That's what it's all about, whether it's online marketing or social media marketing. But understanding financial statements is probably at least a little different than trying to balance my personal finances. Yes. Understanding financial statements. We are going to talk about the main three financial statements. So we will talk about the balance sheet, the profit and loss and then a cash flow statement. And we will go through what are they, first of all, and why do we need them?

Why do you as a business owner need them? What can they tell you? What information you can, you know, you should be running your business off of your balance sheet and your profit and loss statement. And then how are they created? So we talk about QuickBooks at the very end of this seminar because they have a lot of the market and obviously with any type of financial software that you're using, there's usually just a click of a button and you can get these reports. So they're not hard to get, but we go through how to read the reports and make business decisions off of what those reports are telling you. Right. Because it may be easy to click the mouse and there it is on the software, but understanding it as a business owner, like all of us into the marketplace, morning reports, during morning edition every day. But I still don't know what like, I wouldn't know how to read a balance sheet wherever you call them.

Right. So I give handouts actually. So we really walk through the balance sheet, like set by step by step and the profit and loss sheet as well and go through different terms. Lots of times in the financial world, financial people like to you take two terms that mean the same thing. And so you'll see a profit and loss also be called an income statement. So that's very confusing for people if they don't know that they're the same thing. It's kind of a higher level class. I don't dig way deep, but I just try to give the basics. And then obviously if the business owner needs more information, they can always do one on one consulting with me. Thank you very much. This morning. You're welcome. Thank you so much. And if you want to register for these workshops, please go to our website at pitstatesmallbusiness.com. We'll have all the information for any of our future workshops and registration information as well as the services that we provide at the SBDC.

Now as assistant director, Dacia Clark at the Kansas Small Business Development Center here at Pittsburgh State and Mindy Lee, State Marketing Manager. All three of these classes taking place next Wednesday. The first one starts at 8.30 in the morning. There is no cost and all three are open to listeners throughout QRPS's four state coverage area. You can find more information about all three seminars at our news blog, krpsnews.com or the Kansas Small Business Development Center's new website at pitstatesmallbusiness.com.